Crosses disciplinary boundaries to explore German Romantic writing about
visual experience and the interplay of text and image in Romantic
epistemology.
The work of the groundbreaking writers and artists of German Romanticism
-- including the writers Tieck, Brentano, and Eichendorff and the
artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge -- followed from
the philosophical arguments of the German Idealists, who placed emphasis
on exploring the subjective space of the imagination. The Romantic
perspective was a form of engagement with Idealist discourses,
especially Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Fichte's Science of
Knowledge. Through an aggressive, speculative reading of Kant, the
Romantics abandoned the binary distinction between the palpable outer
world and the ungraspable space of the mind's eye and were therefore
compelled to develop new terms for understanding the distinction between
"internal" and "external." In this light, Brad Prager urges a
reassessment of some of Romanticism's major oppositional tropes,
contending that binaries such as "self and other," "symbol and
allegory," and "light and dark," should be understood as alternatives to
Lessing's distinction between interior and exterior worlds. Prager thus
crosses the boundaries between philosophy, literature, and art history
to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience, examining
the interplay of text and image in the formulation of Romantic
epistemology.
Brad Prager is Associate Professor of Germanat the University of
Missouri, Columbia.
